Large organizations are geographically distributed. They may have a few large central sites that have high-speed local area networks (LANs) where local data can be consolidated into a central area or system. However, large organizations may also have smaller remote offices, branch offices, or/and other edge locations that have lower bandwidth and higher latency connectivity to the centralized data repositories. The edge locations may not have information technology (IT) staffs to service local data needs such as, for example, backing up the servers or replacing failing hardware and/or software. Users at remote offices can typically see much poorer performance, reliability, and services from the corporate IT infrastructure than their counterparts at a central site.
Sharing data across large sites is also cumbersome. These sites are usually connected by dedicated high bandwidth links. However, the geographical distances between sites impose latencies that are unacceptable for many applications.
The current solution is to provide a file server (such as a filer from Network Appliance, Inc.) at each edge location and automatically back up the server to a central location over the wide area network (WAN). Read-only data that is shared across sites can be replicated by using asynchronous mirroring. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and streaming traffic can be cached using a network cache such as, for example, the NetCache appliance from Network Appliance, Inc.
Managing file servers at edge locations can be expensive in terms of cost and/or resource. The task of backing up data across WANs requires careful planning and administration. Replicating read-only volumes across WANs is often an overkill. In many cases, only a small percentage of the volume is actually used on a regular basis (e.g., /usr/local/bin). Typically, dynamic data sets (e.g., home directories of a user) cannot be replicated and must be managed independently at each location.
Therefore, the above-described products and approaches are limited to particular capabilities and features and suffer from a number of constraints.